Electronic Spreadsheet (Excel) Handout 3



VLOOKUP, Workbook, Conditional Formatting, and Sorting

 

General Notes:

1. You are REQUIRED to read through the handout, and work through the exercises (if applicable), so you will come to class with a "prepared mind."

2. Common tasks that you are already familiar with from other Office applications (such as Open, Close, Print) are not noted here. You can try applying in Excel many skills you learned in Word and they mostly work in similar ways.

Section 3-1: VLOOKUP

We have learned to use nested IF to write a formula to determine a student’s grade based on his/her percentage scores. We used four levels of IF to determine one among five grades (A, B, C, D, and F). However, what if we use “+/-” system, which has additional seven levels (A-, B+, …, D-)? We will then need to write a very complex nested IF formula which will exceed the allowable levels of IFs in Excel. How can we, then, accomplish the task? The VLOOKUP function comes into play here.

VLOOKUP function allows us to look up a value (numeric or text, such as a score) in a list (such as a score-grade correspondence table), and when a match is found, return (assign) the value of the corresponding item (such as a letter grade in our example).

The syntax for VLOOKUP function is:

=VLOOKUP(cell to be looked up, data range to look up, the number indicating the column in the range where the results of the look-up are listed)

Example (To save space, we still use five grades; pay attention to the color code):

|  |A |B |C |D |

|4 |Sales ($million) |Digital Camera |DV |City Totals |

|5 |Las Vegas |20 |9 |29 |

|6 |Los Angeles |14 |11 |25 |

|7 |Phoenix |8 |3 |11 |

|8 |San Francisco |18 |7 |25 |

|9 |Product totals |60 |30 |90 |

Figure 3-6 Sales data of IntelliImage

The VP for Marketing of IntelliImage would like to see the sales regions listed according to their sales performance, highest first (descending). Here is what you would do:

(1) Highlight A4:D8 – data, city totals, and the column headers, but NOT “Product totals”: you want to leave the product totals as the last row.

(2) Select Data on menu bar, select Sort, and a sort dialog box will appear as in Figure 3-7 below.

(3) You want to sort by City Totals. Click at the down-arrow button at the sort by box and a drop-down list of fields would allow you to choose City Totals you want to sort on.

(4) If you want to sort on a different field when there are more than one row having the same city total, you can then choose a field in the Then by box. This would be your secondary sorting field.

[pic]

Figure 3-7: Sort by City Total

(5) Click OK and your data is sorted!

(6) Similarly, you can sort on other fields such as Digital Camera or DV.

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Assign/return

to cell C5

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